Rashwan, N. (2024). Vertical Poetics: Robert Lax and the Question of Form. Journal of the Faculty of Arts - Alexandria University, 74(117), 1-42. doi: 10.21608/bfalex.2024.370496
Nagy Rashwan. "Vertical Poetics: Robert Lax and the Question of Form". Journal of the Faculty of Arts - Alexandria University, 74, 117, 2024, 1-42. doi: 10.21608/bfalex.2024.370496
Rashwan, N. (2024). 'Vertical Poetics: Robert Lax and the Question of Form', Journal of the Faculty of Arts - Alexandria University, 74(117), pp. 1-42. doi: 10.21608/bfalex.2024.370496
Rashwan, N. Vertical Poetics: Robert Lax and the Question of Form. Journal of the Faculty of Arts - Alexandria University, 2024; 74(117): 1-42. doi: 10.21608/bfalex.2024.370496
Vertical Poetics: Robert Lax and the Question of Form
This article discusses the work of the American poet and visual artist Robert Lax (1915-2000) whose experiments with ‘Vertical Poetics” since the mid-twentieth century have marked what might be seen as a unique aesthetic endeavor in the history of English poetry. As this article will argue, such a position of uniqueness does not rest on the visual effects of the written words on the page alone as most experimental Visual Poetry does, but, more significantly, on the very special ways in which both form and content complement one another. Arguably, Lax’s poetics offer identifiably particular ways of employing content to convey the delicacies of the optic dimensions of his poems in such a way as to make both continually active in reception. This is partially the reason behind the utter lack of critical appraisal which Lax’s poetics have been exposed to over the past few decades. Rather than simply identifying Lax’s poetics with Concrete or, more generally, Visual Poetics, with their many denominations and forms, as few critics have done, this article will argue that it offers a very particular method of composition that integrates the conventional and the non-conventional, the visual and the verbal, the optical, the abstract and the linguistic, all together in a unique poetic formulae inspiring sublime feelings of wonder, surprise, and discovery
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